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Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Time

My perception of time is ever changing right now. Fast. Slow. Fast. Slow. Pip - everything about Pip is fast. I feel like he’s scooting through life, through each season, each year, so quickly, I can barely keep up. Sometimes it’s as though I am watching Pip’s early life shoot past like a movie on fast forward. And I want to slow it down. Savour the moments more, but each and every day, he’s changing, growing, catapulting towards being that man he’ll one day become, the one I can only imagine right now. I want to shout; “Not so fast, Pip”. But even if I did, it wouldn’t stop my little space shuttle rattling through the universe. I can’t stop it, all I can do is watch him orbit, watch him grow and go. So, I select the fast shutter speed on the camera inside my head and instead hope I can capture enough of the best bits to treasure forever.

Almost in tandem, things feel slow. Like I’m a time traveller straddling two universes. This pregnancy is passing slowly. A slow steady wait, until I meet the person inside me. Like waiting for Christmas as a child, and beginning the countdown in April. Nights pass slowly, uncomfortably, shifting, lying awake in the dark, repositioning the bump pillow. In daytime, tired from lack of sleep, devoid of caffeine, I shift zombie like around the house. Things take longer, climbing the stairs to the top for instance. I never used to get out of breath before. Time - again, reminding me; you’re not as young as you used to be - take it easy, older mother.

Fast again. Lists. I have many lists. There are many things I must do before baby arrives. I urge myself to work through it at propelled speed. Will I ever get it all done? On my 'nice to do list' list, albums to make, baby books to finish. Projects I have started but have been slow to complete, thinking I had ‘all the time in the world’. Now I want to go fast. To tidy, to document, to cast my butterfly net into the past, and capture all those blue sky, wonderful moments forever. Suddenly, it seems urgent that I do it now. That I ensure everything is in order.

Slow. The watch on my wrist. Twelve years I’ve had this watch. Only two new batteries, ever. I have noticed that recently my watch is running behind time, as if my body has influenced it with some invisible force. It’s weary, like me. Needs a rest. I keep forgetting that it’s not correct. I leave the house, thinking I’ve allowed plenty of time for a journey, only to find that I have arrived late. My head is slow too. I find it hard to write. This week I spelt Pip’s name wrong. I looked at it for days, on a piece of paper on the wall, I thought; there’s something not quite right about that name inked in red. Is it the way I formed the letters? Has writing it in felt tip pen make it look strange? Three days later, I realised his name was spelt incorrectly. See what I mean? Slow.

I wonder if Pip feels the same sense of fast and slow that I do right now. For him, EB must be taking an age to appear. He’s known about him for such a long time, I wonder if he thinks he’ll ever come out of my tummy?

Time is becoming less of an abstract concept for Pip now. ‘When?’ and ‘How long?’ are two common prefixes to questions these days. He tries to tell the time, looking at the big white clock in the lounge, but he is still too young. ‘Mummy, it’s thirty past ten’ he’ll say. He understands minutes though. Little fingers get pushed together and held up in front of my face; “Mummy, I’m just going to watch the TV for four more minutes." He knows that one minute is a short time, but he doesn’t remember that there are sixty minutes in an hour, that’s still too much to comprehend. He just knows, that overall, in space and time, there are a lot of minutes.

His favourite new thing to say is; "I love you all of the minutes, Mummy".

When I hear that, everything stops, everything is timeless. I cherish the moment, tucking it away in the memory box in my head. Fast, slow, however time feels it is passing, knowing that someone loves you, unconditionally, through every tick of the clock is mind blowingly amazing.

8 comments:

Well - pauses to think - if you are finding it hard to write I take my invisible Yorkshire cap off to you - because that was a beautifully written and very thought provoking post. You wrote about time and the different experiences of being with Pip and yourself in pregnancy very, very evocatively. I would love to know your thought process on this post - has this been burning away in your mind for a while or did it just come spontaneously? Really enjoyed the flow of this - I was going quick - slow - quick - slow when I was reading it. I remember those final months of pregnancy very well too - the pregnancy pillow! "I love you all the minutes, Mummy" - How gorgeous is that!? XXX.

This was a spontaneous brain dump. One of those ones you think - should I even bother publishing this? (or is that just me?) - but I decided it was a good reflection of how I'm feeling at this moment in time, and might one day be interesting to look back on. Thanks for your lovely words. x

Well I'm glad you published it. I had a hunch that was a spontaneous 'dump' by the way it flowed - the words just poured onto the page. Personally I find that the best posts are often the spontaneous ones! :o).

Great post and I could have written almost every word which was a bit weird! The amount of times I have got breathless and almost dizzy from going up the stairs is ridiculous! Alex always says 4 minutes instead of 1 or 5 too. I bet your heart melts when he says "I love you all the minutes"! x